Page 87 of So Wild

Sober sex is great.Why doesn’t everyone have sober sex?

As Scott moved away from her, swabbing himself with some tissues she kept in a box by the bed, Sam pulled the toy from herself and placed it on the bedside table. She couldn’t help smiling. Some people said sex was only for reproduction but how was that possible when she wanted to do so many things that didn’t have the slightest chance of getting her pregnant?

Conscious of Scott’s gaze on her, she felt the cold of not-knowing wash over her. She was about to get up and clean her dildo when he climbed back onto the bed and touched her waist. “Stay. Just a moment, please?”

Sam stayed, though she wanted nothing but to leave. She’d slept with Scott Sanderson. No, worse than that, she’d used her private sex toys on herself while blowing Scott Sanderson after he’d climbed in through her bedroom window. She turned and half-buried her face in her pillow, embarrassed by what they’d just done.

“Samantha? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, fine,” she lied. “That was some good, distrustful almost-sex, Galahad.”

She could practically feel a space opening up between them, separating their bodies with close to two decades of baggage.

“It could have been different, you know that.”

“I know,” Sam told the pillow. “I don’t know why I couldn’t just say the stupid words.”

There was a short pause. “I was hoping you wouldn’t just say the words, Samantha. I was hoping you’d mean them. But that was bloody naive of me, wasn’t it?”

Sam opened her mouth, but that same force from earlier stopped her. She felt Scott get up and she rolled onto her side to watch him pick up his clothes. She observed his beauty abstractly; as though he were a tattoo she’d just layered into someone else’s skin. She raised her hand, looking at the daisy tattoo her father and sisters shared. Blood and ink. How did anyone trust anyone who didn’t share blood and ink?

Scott pulled his hoodie over her head and upon catching sight of her face, his expression softened. “Are you okay?”

Sam put down her wrist, feeling prickly and lonely and childish. “Yeah. I mean, no. Look, I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to fuck with your head, but this is so big. It’s too much and…”

She broke off, unable to keep spilling her guts in front of this stupidly beautiful, stupidly capable man who only wanted her to be the functional human she had no idea how to be.

Scott moved back toward the bed, kneeling down so their eyes were level. “Hey, it’s not over, Sammy. You’re allowed to not be ready. You don’t have to say things you don’t mean, just yet. I’m sorry for being snippy, I just wish I knew what was going on in your head.”

“Me too,” she said. “You were right, about the games, about needing to play. I need to play but I also need space and I don’t know how to feel safe around you, Scott. I don’t know how to make a future between us work. I don’t even know what it looks—”

There was a loud bang downstairs and they both jumped.

“Hello sisterrrrrrr!” Tabby called out. “I’m home before three, are you proud of meeee?”

“Shit,” Sam said. “She’ll be up here in a minute, you have to go.”

Scott didn’t need to be told twice. He backed away, picking up his t-shirt and tugging it over his head, making all his beautiful muscles flex.

“Will we ever have sex?” she asked.

He looked at her, his expression calm but grave. “I don’t know. Do you think you’ll ever be able to trust me?”

Sam licked her lips. It was a big ask, but not an unreasonable one. She prodded herself, wondering what she would need to know in order to trust Scott Sanderson. A question popped into her brain and she blurted it out. “Where were you the day Nicole’s pictures were stolen?”

Scott blinked. “You mean when I told the cops I was at the shopping center?”

“Yeah.”

He hesitated, and Sam was sure he wasn’t going to tell her, but then the corners of his mouth turned down. “I was…at my mother’s grave crying my eyes out.”

His words struck her like a punch to the gut, not just because the image was heartbreaking but because it made the spaces between them show as stark as bones on an x-ray. The spaces she had no ability to close. And yet she still couldn’t say she trusted him, because she didn’t. She trusted her sisters and her dad. Three was enough. Three had always been enough.

“Okay,” Sam said, because she didn’t know what else to say. “Are you going?”

“I am. I won’t be coming to see you again and I won’t pester you with calls or letters. If you want to see me you know where I am, but if you do, come and see me…”

“Yes?”

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